Blended families a balancing act

Sunday

Aug 31, 2008 at 11:30 PM

LEANNE ITALIE

Brad and Angelina, meet the Remillards and the Sears.

They don't have your millions, or your chateau in France, but their families represent a delicious palette, just like yours. They're among the parents who are mixing "born-to" children with transracial adoption, changing the face of the American family.

Combining race and color, biology and adoption offers the promise of great rewards, along with complex and lifelong challenges for parents and kids alike. Among them: embracing birth cultures, fostering healthy self-identities, dealing with issues of isolation and abandonment, addressing perceived favoritism within the family, and preparing for sometimes rude intrusions from outside the family.

Bill Sears of rural Otega, N.Y., and his wife, Teresa, have four children - the oldest a biological daughter, followed by a son from the Philippines, another from Ecuador and a daughter from Russia.

"Some of the reason that our three adopted children have fit in as well as they have and feel that they fit in as well as they do is attributable to the acceptance that our daughter gave them," Sears said.

Their oldest, now 18, was in kindergarten when they expanded their family through international adoption. They involved her in every step of the process, from weeks of paperwork and visits by a social worker to traveling and caring for the new arrivals.

In addition to birthdays, there are adoption days to be celebrated and holidays related to birth cultures, and the occasional rude question when they're out and about in their predominantly white town.

"I don't go out of my way to go farther than I have to in answering a person's question," Sears said. "I don't feel the obligation to point out the reason for all of our differences."

Within the family, experts advise parents to acknowledge and embrace those differences. Beth Hall, who co-founded the Oakland, Calif.-based Pact, a national adoption alliance dedicated to adopted children of color, cringes when she hears parents who are raising blended families discuss "sameness."

While connected as a family, acknowledging differences builds security and self-esteem, said Hall, who has an adopted sister and is the mother of two adopted kids, one Latina and one black.

The number of children adopted internationally has totaled about 20,000 a year so far this decade - more than half transracially, according to the latest federal figures. About 20 percent of the black children adopted out of foster care are adopted by white families.

In Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod, James and Maureen Remillard have eight kids - four biological, two from Ethiopia and two from South Korea. The oldest is now 27, and the youngest two are both 9.

"Everybody assumes the Asian kids are adopted but they always assume the black kids are foster kids," Maureen Remillard said. "Cape Cod is not exactly a rainbow. We're just very open about it. It's our little United Nations."

But questions of identity can nag, even into adulthood.

John Raible and Lisa Gordon are adults now, both raised by parents of a different race. With their "born-to" siblings, they're part of a blend created through biology and transracial adoption.

"Even in adulthood, the question lingers, 'Where do we fit in?' " said Raible, who is biracial and was raised by white parents in a predominantly white environment, in the documentary "Struggle for Identity."

Raible, a transracial adoption researcher and multicultural educator - and himself the dad of two black sons - focused on the issue for his dissertation. He concluded after in-depth interviews with a dozen families that they "can minimize race and try to remain safe, oblivious and colorblind, or they can embrace racial and cultural differences and educate themselves about, and eventually take up in a principled way, anti-racism and multiculturalism."

Gordon, 26, grew up in Fairport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. Her parents adopted her from South Korea at age six months after her sister Megan was born.

"It was a very cookie cutter, suburban white town," Gordon said. "I do remember feeling different and my sister thinking a lot of the time, 'People don't know we're sisters. They think we're friends.'"

Gordon's 30-year-old sister, Megan Comstock, also recalls the frustration when people questioned their relationship.

"I'm, like, 'How do you not get it?' I think celebrities get a bad reputation for adopting," she said when asked about the Brangelina six pack of three transracially adopted kids and three bios, including newborns Vivienne and Knox.

"People say, 'Oh, they have money. They're rich and famous,' but it helps for those people to be out there and to be seen and to talk about it," said Comstock, who teaches school in Rochester, N.Y.

Gordon advises families that are blended like hers to "be as open as possible. Really talk things through" when issues arise.

Kathy Heinlein in Anchorage, Alaska, is the mother of a biological 8-year-old boy and two younger girls from China. When the family goes out in public, she says, complete strangers will ask if the girls are from China, while "very few people have any interest in asking about our son, who looks just like us."

Experts urge parents to be prepared for the journey.

"The old school is, 'I will adopt my child and keep going just like we gave birth,'" said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and father of two adopted children. "Well, that's not the case. It's right there whether you as a parent feel like dealing with it or not. You have a big job to do. It requires more education for the parent, and in a sense more parenting."